I love this thread over at /r/movies about ‘Great Women Stories’ because it encapsulates a problem I’m hoping that Mesh will solve. To whit, most ‘women’ movies today are silly women-repackaged-as-men movies and they aren’t that good:
One hour ago, I just watched Ocean’s eight followed by Ghostbuster (2016). I can tell you it left me with a bad aftertaste.
Those films were so focused on replacing men that i can not fathom the point of it all.
If it was meant to empower women, well, it’s a fail.One doesn’t empower women by forcefully adding wo- in front of any men/man in a pile of books/scripts.
This Wo-wo- syndrom needs to stop.
If we want to empower women we need to tell the tales of women, forge great stories about them. Women don’t need to be anything else than women in the movie industry to be great. They are no substitute or just a smiling sexy face representing a target market. we don’t need to replace men heroes with women to make them great.
They are amazing human being that can be heroes of their own.
This individual is right, of course. Too often, a female protagonist feels like a checked box, a ‘look at us, we’re diverse!’ move. I’m not a girl, so I can’t speak for them, but I have to imagine that this is insulting. It’s why I made a rule for myself with Mesh, that it would be a great story about young women who don’t need to be anything else other than themselves to be great. Sam and Tina, are awesome people unto themselves for a variety of reasons that you’ll come to know. They aren’t repackaged characters, they’re fully three-dimensional. They have good days and bad, senses of humor and dark sides, just like all of us.
The current market of movies like ‘Oceans 8’ and ‘Ghostbusters’ really are a poor answer to a real question – how do you tell the tale of women who are heroes of their own? Wonder Woman got it right, so what’s their excuse? Ghostbusters was such a ‘this is about gender’ movie that they should have called it ‘Ghostbusthers.’ At least that would be honest.
As I said before, I didn’t write Mesh to be some weird statement. I think Mesh and scifi in general have an opportunity to talk about a time where the future just *is*. My hope is that Mesh finds a home with people like the OP of this Reddit thread and that it fills their needs and many others. To get there, of course, we have to get there. Mesh is still waiting for feedback / acceptance. I’ll let you know more as soon as I do.